Rarely do children die in movies. For all its violence, Hollywood typically reserves the death of a child for gratuitous sympathy shots in war and disaster films. They are the most innocent victims of civilian bombings and earthquakes, police shootouts and alien invasions. Only in rare cases is the suffering of a child anything more than the innocent counterpoint to the suffering of adults, the breaking point in the tragedy.
In The Hunger Games film, released this past Friday nationwide, children do die on screen. They are killed in brutal fashion by other children, without glory or fanfare. Suzanne Collins, author of the eponymous book series, earned enough praise for her portrayal of children killing children that many speculated about how the movie would treat the same issue. Yet somehow, the movie manages to dance around the book’s central tensions in a way that can only be described as safe.
Let’s be clear: The Hunger Games is a fantastic film. Within the first few scenes, Gary Ross and his art team dissipate any worries that this book-to-movie transition would prove as embarrassing as those of Twilight and The Golden Compass. The scene of the Reaping, whitewashed and unnervingly silent, is masterful in its sincerity, and the rest of the film is equally striking, both in aesthetics and emotion. The plot moves quickly and the sets are beautiful. Best of all, Ross keeps close to the source material, often following the novel page by page, in what is undoubtedly a conscious decision not to risk the disappointment of the books’ millions of fans.
Yet in a different sense, The Hunger Games strays far from the book, if only because certain elements of the novel simply cannot translate to film. All the scenes are there in the correct order, but the inner monologue of Katniss – her ambiguities about Peeta, her discomfort about killing – finds no parallel on the screen. Jennifer Lawrence is effective as a steely-eyed, unbreakable bad-ass, but in the absence of her conflicts and questions, Katniss is no longer the emotional center of the story but a mirror against which the bitterness of Haymitch or the fear of Primrose are reflected. When she and Peeta, unable to sleep on their last night in the Capitol, discuss their fear of the Games, Katniss asks questions but gives no answers.
Indeed it is Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, who is the most engaging and conflicted character in the movie. The largest departure from the book, however, is that the enemies of Katniss and Peeta are not Cato and Clove but the Capitol. The boys and girls from Districts 1 and 2 are certainly menacing, but the action of the Games is frequently cut with scenes of the Gamemakers’ room and nefarious conversations between the President and Seneca Crane, explicitly foreshadowing the uprisings of the later books.Â
In other words, Ross makes a great effort to divert focus away from the murder of middle schoolers. In the most poignant and unexpected scene in the novel, Cato gives a speech– nowhere to be found in the book– as he stands atop the Cornucopia, his arm around Peeta’s throat. Resigned to death, he tells the audience through a mouthful of blood that he has failed to bring honor to his district. Yes, the children of The Hunger Games suffer, but their suffering is not a personal or psychological one but rather a brutal punishment inflicted by the adults of their universe. In this way, the movie loses the nuanced emotions of the book in a manner that is all too familiar for Hollywood.